Video still from SXSW's stream (texastribune.org/livestream/sxsw2014/)

The NSA and GCHQ will soon have the ability to spy on the entire planet, as their capabilities double every 18 months, Julian Assange told the South by Southwest (SXSW) conference on Saturday.

The Wikileaks founder made a Skype appearance at the interactive
technology festival, which is taking place in the city of Austin.

“The ability to surveil everyone on the planet is almost
there, and arguably will be there in a few years,” said
Assange. “And that’s led to a huge transfer of power from the
people who are surveilled upon to those who control the
surveillance complex. It’s an interesting postmodern version of
power.”

Assange also posed the question, “How is it that the internet
that everyone looked upon as perhaps the greatest tool of human
creation that had ever been has, in fact, been co-opted and [is]
now involved in the most aggressive form of state surveillance
the world has ever seen?”

He added that the world is “moving into a new totalitarian
world — not in the sense of Stalin or Pol Pot, but totalitarian
in the sense that the surveillance is total.”

#Assange:
Totalitarian dystopia in the sense that the surveillance is
total, so that no one can exist outside the state....

Prior to the Edward Snowden leaks, the NSA's public relations
campaign was non-existent, Assange told the large audience while
speaking from the Ecuadorian embassy in London. In fact,
reporters used to joke that NSA stood for “no such
agency.”

Snowden, a former contractor for the agency, last year exposed
mass global surveillance programs led by the NSA and Government
Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), its British counterpart. The
leaks exposed the agencies' practices of tapping the internet
networks, emails, and phone calls of millions of ordinary
citizens and political leaders.

Assange criticized the current power balance as “totalitarian
dystopia,” by which he meant that “surveillance is
total, so that no one exists outside the state.”

Whereas only four years ago the internet was largely an
apolitical space, it is has now – through movements such as the
Arab Spring and the Occupy movement – become a tool to motivate
and organize political change. This means that those in power
will seek to control and surveil such a tool, the Australian
activist said.

'Courage is seeing fear'

To showcase the claim, Assange pointed at Snowden and various
other whistleblowers, including those from Wikileaks.

British journalist and legal researcher Sarah Harrison, US
filmmaker Laura Poitrasa, and US computer security researcher
Jacob Applebaum are now all living in effective exile in Berlin,
while Glenn Greenwald – who used to be a freelance writer for the
Guardian and wrote many of the reports from Edward Snowden on the
NSA – is in Brazil. Edward Snowden himself was forced to seek
asylum in Russia.

#Assange:
Harrison (UK), Poitras (US), Appelbaum (US) are now all in
effective exile in Berlin. NatSec reporters are a new type of
refugee.

Partly as a result of the NSA leaks scandal, Brazil has become a
powerful advocate of trying to limitmass global surveillance. In
April, the country will try to introduce changes to the Internet
Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) regulations.
ICANN is responsible for the coordination of the global
internet's systems.

But Assange warned that it will be very difficult to turn back
the tide of mass global surveillance, as the surveillance
agencies hold all the cards and all the power. Specifically, it
would be practically impossible for anyone within the government
to meaningfully reduce the powers of the surveillance agencies.

“We know what happens when a government gets serious: someone
gets fired, prosecuted, etc. These have not happened to the
NSA,” he said.

#Assange:
You've got no choice. You can no longer hide from the state or
keep your head down. Arbitrary justice is arbitrary. #sxsw

He gave as an example the case of General David Petraeus, former
head of the CIA, who was squeezed out over an extramarital affair
scandal in 2012 – although the official version of events is that
he resigned after an extramarital affair was discovered by the
FBI, Assange said.

“There has been a military occupation of internet space – a
very serious phenomenon," Assange told the attendees.

Before Wikileaks exposures, "we weren't actually living in
the world, we were living in some fictitious representation of
the world," Assange noted. The surveillance of the internet
is “the penetration of our civilian society. It means that
there has been a militarization of our civilian space. A military
occupation of the Internet, our civilian space, is a very serious
one.”

“Only a fool has no fear. Courage is seeing fear,” he
said.

When asked if he would have done anything differently over the
past few years, Assange was adamant that he would not have stayed
in the UK, adding that it has a distasteful class system, unlike
his native Australia. He said he listened to bad advice from his
lawyers, who have profited vastly from the publicity of
representing him, while Assange himself has been stuck in the
Ecuadorian Embassy for over a year and a half.

Assange said there will be more leaks to come, without specifying
the timeframe. “Yes, there is important upcoming
material,” he remarked. “I don’t like to give time
frames because it tends to give the opponents of that material
more time to prepare their spin lines.”

Assange says he has been at the embassy for over 650 days. I
feel naive for thinking it would be resolved within weeks.